lean not on your own understanding

Something we see fairly often in our practice with small- and medium-sized enterprises is that their business development comes from what we call "relationship selling." This stems from mutual trust and clear communication -- and typically, a long-standing relationship.

While this is an effective business practice, especially for project-based work, it will only carry you so far. When the business development is done by the business owner or entrepreneur, we see three key limitations:

Bottlenecks will choke a business. A business head needs to oversee financials, work product, human resource management -- and cannot spend all of his or her time in developing or maintaining relationships. How many business lunches can you have in a week? Five -- and they are time-consuming!

Which comes first -- the chicken or the egg? When trying to develop new clients, it is hard to build trust until you have the job, and it's hard to get the job if you don't have the trust. We recently asked a prospective client, "What makes you different than your competitors?" The answer was, "We operate with integrity." While that is certainly admirable, it is only realized as you conduct business, not before.

The inner circle can be fenced in. As a business leader, you understand what you offer and can speak to your customers' business needs. It is not uncommon for that understanding to be limited to a few key people at the top, who interact regularly with one another. And very often it is tacitly understood, rather than explicitly communicated.

The good news is that these limitations can be overcome by doing two things:

Bring the company vision into focus across the organization. Dig deep into understanding what makes your company better -- and learn to communicate it in terms of benefits to clients, rather than features or capabilities that you offer. Why should a customer care that you have low turnover? Perhaps because you can offer consistent service from experienced representatives who love what they do -- and the customer won't experience a "revolving door" of people to orient to the project or organization.

Invest in your front line so the people performing the work can communicate -- and demonstrate -- the vision you have for your organization. Often that investment takes the form of interpersonal skill development, such as how to make a strong first impression, how to inspire trust, how to handle conflicts, how to speak in terms of benefits instead of features.

​With a well-defined vision for your organization, and a well-prepared workforce, your front line will get the message -- so you have more people doing relationship selling and business development.